Watching
by Dreaming of Everything
Summary: Hiei's gotten into the habit of watching Botan, but she doesn't know... Onesided HieiBotan, on the dark side of things.


**Watching**

**By Dreaming of Everything**

**Disclaimer**: I do not own Yu Yu Hakusho. I'm merely trespassing on others' intellectual property.

**Author's Notes**: This is much darker than my previous pieces. There will be some pretty severe violations of privacy, no real romance of any sort, general messed-upness, and masturbation in it. If you don't like that, please don't read it.

Also, please note that this is a oneshot and is **finished**. There will be no second part, no second chapter.

oOoOoOo

Hiei is always watching Botan. It's not like he has anything better to do, in-between whatever chores Koenma can find for them. Even then, he's with her.

She doesn't know he does it or she would doubtless be more careful. As things are he sees everything, and she _doesn't_ know. Hiei likes it that way. He doesn't want to deal with her if she found out otherwise.

So he sees the ins and outs of her life, the daily and weekly and monthly ups and downs, sees everything she expects people to see and everything she thinks is between only herself and one other person and everything she thinks nobody else knows about.

Hiei watches Botan when she's writing in her diary, biting on the end of her pencil eraser, blindly making faces at the taste of the rubber, but he doesn't bother to read what she's written. He knows what has happened to her throughout the day, sometimes better than she does, and she has the bad habit of thinking aloud (it was always loud, with her!) so he knows the most private details of her personal life without ever having to stoop to reading through the notebook she writes in.

Hiei knows that most weather will make her smile after centuries of being dead, but that heavy rain will make her giddy, make her twirl in it, laughing, generally all alone, except for him, until her hair is plastered to her head and neck and shoulders and her shirt is soaked through, clinging to her, revealing to the world nearly everything that he sees when she bathes, all alone, and that fact makes him fiercely jealous, although he's not sure why.

Hiei has seen her dance, when she thinks she's all alone and nobody is watching. He never knows what the music is because it's always some stupid human trend, one he refuses to pay attention to, and he doesn't know if what she does compares to what other humans do when they dance, but there is a grace to her body as she twists herself around the strains of music that is captivating, that is what made him watch her in the first place, and she makes no effort to restrain herself because she doesn't know he's watching.

Hiei has watched her cry and watched her laugh and watched her do both simultaneously; it gives him a hysterical sort of intimacy with her feelings. If he had cared it would have worried him, but he doesn't care, one way or another, it's all the same to him, so it doesn't. He merely observes her gulping, choking bursts of laughter, her face red and smeared with tears, chest heaving spasmodically.

He has seen her depressed, seen her despondent, unable to work up the energy to move, to cook or even to buy food, to bathe or dress herself, to pick up her mail or clean the house or let in the cat.

He's seen her happy, and seen her fake happiness. He's watched enough that he can tell the difference. Most of the time she is honest about her feelings, but everyone has off days. Botan is more likely to have off weeks and off half-months but she is mostly content, he thinks. She has a few casual friends and the Tantei for company, and she is a happy person by nature. There are almost always things to keep her busy.

She doesn't have a boyfriend. She doesn't date at all. Hiei accepts this, and refuses to think about what he would feel, what he would think, do, if she did. He doesn't think about _why_, or _why not_.

Hiei has heard Botan sing. She isn't any good, is, in fact, noticeably bad, her voice thin and wavery, cracking slightly on high notes, but she does it anyways, when she's all alone, or thinks she is, as she does dishes and sweeps floors. Nobody but Hiei has ever heard her, and she thinks nobody has, and likes it that way. She likes the feeling of secrets.

Hiei is intimately acquainted with her body but not with intimacy, knows it but only from a distance. He watches her all the time, and doesn't care enough to give her the luxury of privacy when she bathes. He knows that, if she knew, she wouldn't revel in the water like she does, stretching and twisting, arms skimming over bare skin under the warm spray from the showerhead, the water and various soaps concealing nothing. She sleeps naked.

He watches her sleep, watches her twitch and mumble from her dreams, turn and whimper, or just lay there, still and immobile. Sometimes they are nightmares and sometimes they're merely dreams. Once, she woke up laughing. More often she wakes up screaming or crying or merely baffled.

When she gets dressed she often discards several outfits before finding that day's permutation on the perfect one, and Hiei is scathingly scornful of her silly, inconsequential human insecurities. She always leaves the house in the mornings with her closet torn apart, but she carefully hangs everything up again when she returns. It's a futile gesture—they all get pulled off their hangers the next morning anyways—and not one Hiei would ever bother with, if he had any spare clothes, but it seems to give Botan some sort of peace. He doesn't understand, and so he ignores it.

Different people bring out different facets of someone, and it's often argued that the purest, closest-to-whole image of a person is brought out when they are alone. Even Botan doesn't know herself the way Hiei does, now, but people often don't have an accurate sense of themselves.

Hiei has seen the most humiliating, private moments of Botan's life, the ones that would make her cringe if she knew he knew, if anyone knew. He's seen her curled up, clutching her abdomen and a hot water bottle against the cramps during her period, the pain so bad she vomits. He's seen her make mistakes, incorrect assumptions or error-ridden second-hand knowledge, when talking to a friend and humiliate herself. He's seen her pleasure herself, utterly silent except for gasped breaths, the bed creaking beneath her, fingers inside her and rubbing and touching and pushing, her body writhing, a series of long, drawn-out, physical moans, as if her body has to release itself some way, make up for her silence. Hiei often finds himself letting out a breath he didn't know he was holding after she climaxes, tense body growing tenser and suddenly relaxing, and lies limp against the sheets, chest still heaving and cooling sweat sticking strands of hair to her neck.

It is one of the few times she likes the quiet—the rest of the time she is speaking, to herself or to others, or singing or humming or even listening to music. She keeps the water in her aquarium low so the water splashes when it leaves the filter, a never-ending trickle. She falls asleep to soft, low music, a placebo lullaby.

Hiei has been watching Botan for a long time, now. He is long-used to her habits and idiosyncrasies, to the point where she has stopped surprising him long ago. He has yet to stop finding her interesting.

He likes watching her and knowing no one else has seen what he has. He likes knowing her better than anyone else. It has made him possessive, but he knows enough to hide that around her, when she knows he's there. It's the barest fraction of the time they spend together, but only he knows that.

It's gotten to the point where Hiei can't imagine what he'd do if he wasn't watching her do things, but that's another thing he likes to ignore, or at least not think about. He likes to imagine he's still as in-control of his life as he was before. It is easy to do when he is always watching over Botan and she's so unable to change that, so helpless, to the point where she doesn't even know it occurs. Nobody does.

Hiei thinks he will be watching Botan for a while to come.

--End--


End file.
